Rand Paul: GOP can lure back young voters

Sen. Rand Paul believes the Republican Party will make a comeback with young voters, especially in the South, after “drifting toward the other party” in much of the country.

The topic came up Tuesday as Paul met with a high school senior from Arkansas, a meeting POLITICO was invited to attend and which came hours before Paul was to deliver a response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

Paul, a Kentucky Republican who is considering running for president in 2016, didn’t say Tuesday why he believed the GOP could lure back the youth vote.

But the libertarian-leaning senator has argued before that young people could gravitate to the GOP out of concerns over privacy issues, especially regarding National Security Agency surveillance. While President George W. Bush, a Republican, was a leading proponent of such data-collection measures, many of the programs have continued under Obama, who has defended elements of the surveillance effort.

“I don’t know what it’s like in Arkansas, but everywhere else we’ve had them drifting toward the other party,” Paul told the visiting student, Jessica Kloss of Beebe, Ark. “But I think some of them are going to come back, particularly in the South.”

Kloss was in town after winning an essay contest and had expressed interest in meeting Paul. She will be a guest of Rep. Tim Griffin (R-Ark.) at the State of the Union. She said she was impressed with Paul, and that she likes “how honest and bold” he is in “representing conservative values.”